


ache

by MontanaHarper



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: #coulsonlives, Abduction, Break Up, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Implied Torture, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-01
Updated: 2012-09-01
Packaged: 2017-11-13 08:08:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/501320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MontanaHarper/pseuds/MontanaHarper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>The first time, they get her back within hours and only slightly the worse for wear.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	ache

**Author's Note:**

> Back in late July, I was working on another story and was stuck. I asked [Casspeach](http://archiveofourown.org/users/casspeach/profile) to give me a handful of words I could use as prompts for short ficlets, to maybe get my writing going again. This is the first one I've finished (prompt: ache), and it got a little out of hand...by about fifteen hundred words or so.
> 
> The fix-it aspects aren't specifically addressed here, but my headcanon is that Fury lies like a lying thing that lies, so that assumption is always part of my backstories.

The first time, they get her back within hours and only slightly the worse for wear. Tony hovers and apologizes and brings her daffodils and shiny silver balloons ( _Get Well Soon_ and _I Love You_ ). He stands by while she signs discharge paperwork, and then he pushes her wheelchair through the bright, antiseptic-scented halls of the hospital and out into the bright, exhaust-scented streets of New York.

Happy smiles and holds the car door open for her, his _Good to see you, Ms. Potts_ soft but sincere. She slides in to find herself sharing the seat with a stuffed bear that's almost as big as she is, and she laughs from the sheer ridiculousness of it. Tony grins at her and for an instant he's not the cocky, jaded playboy but simply a man in love, pleased to have made her happy.

The second time, rescue doesn't come nearly so quickly. She loses track of time in the windowless cell, her internal clock disrupted by random periods of pitch black and blinding light, by the lack of food and sleep, and by the unknown lengths of time—minutes? hours? days?—she spends unconscious when her body can't cope with the pain. She doesn't have the answers, can't tell them what they want to know even if she wants to (even when she wants to, when her world constricts to a single white-hot moment that goes on forever).

She wakes in the hospital. Tony is asleep in a chair beside her bed, face haggard and body still tense even in repose. He looks worse than when he arrived home from Afghanistan, like he was the one who had been captured, who had been tortured. She wants to say his name, to reach out to him, but it takes too much energy and she slips back into unconsciousness between one breath and the next.

There are no daffodils this time, no balloons and no teddy bears. There is no Tony, either, and she begins to wonder if maybe she hallucinated him here like she had during the worst parts of her captivity, a phantom conjured out of fear and pain and need.

Phil brings her daisies, and is there every day during visiting hours. He tells her that she's in a SHIELD medical facility, that as far as the rest of the world is concerned, she suffered a burst appendix. He brings her papers to sign occasionally, and reassures her that he's taking care of day to day business at Stark Industries. He fakes a smile and changes the subject when she asks about Tony.

No one stands by while she signs discharge paperwork, but there's a man waiting outside her room when she's done. The world wobbles a little, and he steps back until he's closer to the nurse's station than he is to her. His smile is reassuring and his voice is soft as he tells her that Phil sent him, that he's there to see her safely home. He hands the nurse a folded slip of paper to give to her ( _I trust Agent Barton with my life,_ says Phil's familiar, neat writing), and she appreciates his distance and his understanding but she still can't seem to stop the way her hands tremble.

Agent Barton—Clint—leads her through every room in her house, making a show of checking the windows and doors, of looking in closets and under beds. He settles her on the couch in the living room, careful of her ribs and her cast, and tells her that he'll stick around for as long as she needs him to. He makes her miso and rice and tea, and fakes a smile and changes the subject when she asks about Tony.

She doesn't normally watch tabloid television, but she's flipping through channels and something catches her eye. Tony is walking a red carpet, smiling at the cameras and wearing a giggling blonde on either arm. He's a cocky, jaded playboy with supermodel accessories, and she hasn't seen him in a month, hasn't seen him since that first (imagined?) moment when she woke up in the hospital.

The crash startles her. It probably startles Clint, too, because he's by her side in an instant, gun drawn, and she can see why Phil calls him the best. He takes in the scene and seems to shift gears, one kind of tension replacing another as he slips his weapon into his thigh holster. With the television off and the shattered pieces of remote control gathered up, he heads back into the kitchen. She's grateful. She hates crying in front of other people.

She wakes in her own bed, the smell of coffee filling the air. Memories slowly filter in: falling asleep on the couch, Clint lifting her carefully and carrying her to her room, shushing her as she tries to argue that she is perfectly capable of walking. A glance at the clock tells her that she's slept later than usual. She stretches, then follows the soft murmur of voices into the kitchen.

Phil greets her with a cup of coffee, and Clint gives her a nod and smile before turning back to the stove. She sits at the breakfast bar, hands curled around the warm mug, and Clint slides a plate in front of her—toast and sunny-side-up eggs and bacon that's perfectly crisp. Phil takes the seat next to her and Clint leans against the opposite side of the counter, stealing bacon from Phil's plate when his own is gone, the two of them talking quietly about nothing important, and it's soothing.

When Clint starts clearing away the dishes, Phil brings out a blue file folder that's so thin it can't contain more than a few sheets of paper. He hands it to her without a word, and when she flips it open the first thing she sees is an SEC Form 4 indicating that Anthony Stark disposed of a chunk of Stark Industries stock worth $20 million. The paper is dated ten days after her abduction—it's getting easier to think those words now, to think them and still be able to breathe afterward—and she doesn't really know what to make of it.

The next few pages are stamped prominently with CONFIDENTIAL in red letters, but when she looks over at Phil he's staring studiously at his coffee mug, so she starts to read. Four days after the date on the SEC filing, Tony was admitted to SHIELD's medical facilities, unconscious from a blow to the head and suffering from exhaustion. She doesn't have a lot of medical knowledge, but she understands enough to get that he was given IV fluids before he checked himself out against medical advice.

Six days later, Pepper awoke in the hospital to the sight of Tony, wrecked and sleeping at her bedside.

Phil finally looks up when she closes the folder and slides it back over to him. _He refused to let anything get in the way of searching for you_ , he tells her, and _I didn't want you to think he doesn't care._ She squeezes his hand and kisses his cheek, doesn't say _thank you_ because she can feel the tightness in her throat and the tears prickling at her eyes and she refuses to fall apart in front of witnesses.

Later, when she seeks out pictures and video clips, two things strike her. One, Tony's never with the same woman twice, and two, he's smiling and laughing and looking like he's having the best time, except she knows him well enough to recognize—now that she's looking for it—that it's an act. He's wearing his paparazzi face, being TONY STARK, larger than life and twice as promiscuous.

He's playing the bad guy, she realizes suddenly. He's making it easy, making it _guilt-free_ , for her to call off their engagement, while at the same time ensuring that she's not pilloried in the media for breaking the heart of a superhero. And once she figures it out, she's not sure which is strongest: the urge to kiss him or the urge to kick him. She wants to call him and tell him to stop being an idiot, but she can't quite make herself reach for the phone.

Two weeks after she's released from the hospital, the cast comes off. A week after that, she gets up early, puts on her favorite power suit—charcoal with faint pinstriping—and lets Clint drive her to Stark Industries. The world seems more crowded than it did before, and being surrounded by too many people makes her edgy, but she's doing okay until she catches a sharp movement out of the corner of her eye ( _white sparks in the blackness, her head spinning from the impact, a heavy weight on her back that pins her to the concrete floor_ ) as the mailroom guy tosses a package to someone passing in the hall.

She spends an hour curled on the floor of her private washroom, one trembling hand pressed to her mouth like she can hold back the sobs by sheer force of will.

When she wakes that night, throat sore and heart pounding, body sluggish despite the adrenaline, Clint is standing in her doorway, hand on the light switch. He doesn't cross the threshold, but once he sees she's awake he settles on the floor, his back to the doorjamb, and talks to her quietly until the shaking stops. She wonders how he knows exactly what to do, wonders if he's been in her position or if someone he loves has. Or maybe this kind of thing happens so often that dealing with it is included in standard SHIELD training.

Three weeks, four panic attacks, and a dozen nightmares later, she's back to living alone and running Stark Industries full time. It gets a little easier every day, especially after Natalie ( _Natasha_ ) shows up out of the blue one Saturday morning with a gym bag, a venti americano from Pepper's favorite coffee place, and an offer to teach her self defense.

She's started to dial Tony's number half a dozen times, and each time the shaking starts before she's halfway through. In the end she sits in her kitchen and writes him a letter on pale blue, vanilla-scented stationery ( _I'm sorry_ and _thank you_ and _I'll always love you_ ), slipping the envelope into the corner mailbox before she loses her nerve.

The news media are surprisingly gentle with her when they get wind of the break-up. She refuses to say anything bad about Tony, insisting they both agreed they make better friends and business colleagues than romantic partners. When a particularly sleazy tabloid reporter goes after Tony anyway during an Avengers press conference, the rest of the Avengers close ranks and the obviously embarrassed reporter finds himself on national television, being lectured by Captain America about privacy and respect. Knowing that Tony's team has his back—that even if he doesn't have her, he's still not alone—lifts a weight she hadn't realized she was carrying.

She still has good days and bad days, but they're more good than bad now. And the day that Tony pushes past her assistant and into her office, drops down into the chair across from hers and proceeds to spin like a five-year-old until she gets off the phone, and then talks a million miles an hour about a breakthrough with the arc reactor design and how they can probably build one to power all of Manhattan if she'll sign off on the materials and man-hours?

That's one of the really good ones.

Because Tony smiles at her like he used to, like she's his best friend and sometime co-conspirator. It eases the ache behind her breastbone and she's surprised when it doesn't hurt to smile back at him the same way. They've gotten over a hurdle, or turned a corner—some ridiculous spatial metaphor for something that's actually all about time. Or maybe it's about both, because she thinks she can see the future from here; she's got Saturday morning sparring sessions with Natasha, Sunday brunches with Phil and Clint, and now, apparently, random visits from Hurricane Tony.

It's not the future she imagined six months ago, but different doesn't mean worse, and so she smiles and breathes and takes the first step towards it.

**Author's Note:**

> I cannot possibly thank [Casspeach](http://archiveofourown.org/users/casspeach/profile) enough. She betas, cheerleads, holds my hand, and just is basically my lifeline when I'm writing.


End file.
